COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Behold the media!

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.Then, almost with a sigh, she added, “But that’s just Alaska.”

So we're going to run explosive charges and rely on an anonymous waitress.

There were, according to this anonymous source, a half-dozen other witnesses. The juiciest scoop of this reporter's abortive career and there's no effort made to verify a word?

Well, let's hope it's a very short career.

That's inexcusable. Journalistic malpractice, even for a rag called The L.A. Progressive.

Since there is a apparent case of instant amnesia here in the comments I looked it up in Wikipedia

"The good ol' boy network describes a system of social networking and perceptions alleged to exist prevalently among certain communities and social strata in the United States. Although the term originated in the South, these networks can be found throughout the U.S. and the rest of the Western world. It is typically taken to refer to informal legal, judicial, social, religious, business, and political associations among white males ("good ol' boys"); however, in modern times can be composed of either or both sexes. In some areas, the good ol' boy network is said to still exert considerable influence over many aspects of local government, business, and law enforcement. Usage of the term can often imply a wrongful exclusion of others from the network; however, often the emphasis is on inclusion of a member, as in, "doing a good ol' boy a favor"."Source

You were suspect of this story because of a nameless waitress. I was pointing out that Palin had herself painted Alaskans as Good ol boys, lending support to the idea that she might sit in a public place and use racial slurs, common in conversations, with republicans I know.

And all the ones I know are ecstatic with Palin, slurs and all.

"finally someone with the guts to say it out loud"She should use it on he next bumper sticker

"This was the spirit that brought me to the governor's office, when I took on the old politics as usual in Juneau ... when I stood up to the special interests, the lobbyists, big oil companies, and the good-ol' boys network."

So, she's positioning herself as being opposed to the "good-ol' boys network", a reformer who set out to break the power of such groups. Barack Obama wouldn't sound out of place describing his time as an organizer in Chicago as "standing up to the good-ol' boys network of the Chicago city council". The idea that Palin using the phrase in that way is code for her being a racist is frankly nuts.

Also, using "Sambo" as a racist term for black people was archaic in the 1970s. For Sarah Palin, born in 1964, to use it, is just silly. I'm fairly sure people of her generation would use different words were they to resort to racial slurs. The whole story just rings false, and one largely-unnamed source doesn't strike me as enough evidence.

Again, Madtom, is English not your first language? I've studied enough German in the past to know how weird some of their idioms appear to an outsider.